1. Field of the Inventions
Embodiments of the inventions generally relate to shredding machines and, in particular, to apparatus and methods for automatically feeding material to be shredded.
2. Description of the Related Art
Shredding devices are used to aid in recycling and/or to prevent the dissemination of information on paper, compact discs, magnetically striped cards or other media or material. Many conventional shredding devices heretofore available have either been large, expensive machines for use with large quantities of paper or smaller devices for manual, single-sheet feeding by a user. Some shredding devices further allow the user to manually insert a document having up to about ten pages. Oftentimes, such shredding devices are mounted on trash receptacles that are customized for secure attachment of the shredding device.
Smaller, consumer-sized shredding devices typically have limited cutting ability and require manual insertion of a document into the top of the device. Thus, use of these shredding devices can demand significant amounts of time on the part of the user to continually feed paper into the machine. To address this drawback, some consumer-sized shredding devices can automatically feed single pieces of paper sequentially into the device. However, such devices still take long periods of time to shred a substantial amount of paper.